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'It's real. It's violent': After El Paso, Latinos across America live in fear

Across the country, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters contemplate the idea of becoming a target, and worry about the future.

The shooter left a manifesto with anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Now, the fear among Latino people is palpable.

Latinos are calling this a turning point. The shooting, they say, has peeled back the hate behind words they've tried to ignore. It has sliced open the racism many grew up learning to navigate.

How do you turn the other cheek, they wonder, when the weapon is loaded with bullets?

The killing of 22 people in a border city has left them fearful of living in their own country: because of the brown color of their skin, because they speak Spanish or because of where they or their families were born.

Dads are telling their daughters, “Por favor, cuidase, mija,” pleading with them to be careful at work, keep quiet, have an exit plan. School is starting and along with it, some mothers are worrying if they should let their children speak Spanish at school, let them walk to class alone. Friends are telling their amigas, the ones who speak Spanish with an accent, the ones who are darker, who are both immigrant and Latino: Be aware of your surroundings.

Here, Latino and Latina voices from across America tell us in their own words what it is to live in fear.

A MOTHER, CHURCH LEADER

Veronica Arroyo Bonet

Fort Myers, Florida

She’s standing between church pews in a wide aisle that stretches past an American flag to the pulpit. This is where she prays.

Since the shooting, she’s watched the faces of Latino children and parents. At El Buen Samaritano in Fort Myers, Florida, where she’s a church leader. At the Lee County schools where she’s a teacher’s aide. At the malls and parks of Cape Coral, where she lives. And at home with her own children, her own friends and family.

Veronica Arroyo Bonet serves the Latino community in Fort Myers, Florida, as a church leader at El Buen Samaritano (Good Samaritan Assembly of God) and as a teacher's aide in the School District of Lee County.(Photo: Kinfay Moroti/The News-Press USA Today Network-Florida)

She knows their fear:

“To come out on the street and being shot.”

There’s no norm for Latinos in America, not anymore, not since El Paso, she says.

"Every time we go out we think, ‘Are we going to make it back home?' "

She imagines what it’s like for people who are white.

“You wake up, you’re thinking I’m going to get ready to work, leave my kids at school, go do my duty, get back in the car, come back home … that’s the norm,” she says.

For Latinos, everything has changed.

“The Latino community are always thinking, ‘Is this the day that we’re going to have a maniac, a wacko come into the store and shoot you because you’re black, you’re Hispanic?” she says, her hands folding and unfolding as she speaks, her voice rising with each word. “That’s the reality — it’s nerve-wracking."

“I’m convinced that the political stage out there with the president, with Congress, with this certain type of behavior, we feel that we’ve been targeted because of the issue with (the) Mexican border, the issue of all these immigrants and saying they don’t have documents, they don’t have papers,” she says.

Make America Great Again was the campaign slogan.

“I thought we were already great,” she says. “I thought that we really were working hard to make this nation what it is, thanks to our past fathers. But it has gone to the opposite way. We’re not seeing this great America like we thought that we were going to see when we would get older.”

Being a citizen, she says, doesn’t protect Latinos from a white supremacist with a gun and it hasn’t protected her children from words that make them feel like they are less than worthy in their own country.

“I’m a proud Puerto Rican, American citizen, that has come to this country, we’re also American citizens … and I have encouraged my kids to be someone here, to make their dreams come true,” she says. “And they see and they hear all this, ‘Why they keep telling us to go back to our country? We’re also American citizens.’ ”

She knows Latino immigrants from Cuba, the Caribbean, from Mexico and Central America have it worse.

“They come to this country thinking we’re going to the land of freedom, the land where you can make your dreams come true,” she says. “Then you have this enormous person up there, the president of the United States, that’s supposed to represent the person that will give you the hope that they will accept us.”

Hope for Latinos won’t come from the president or his supporters, she says. She relies on her faith.

“I hope that God will be in control and that these politicians try to focus in a different way where they keep God in their lives,” she says. “The best thing that we were able to do was to get on our knees and pray and keep praying for all of our children, our families, our communities.”

When she’s not praying, she faces a new reality, one that was made clear when a shooter traveled to El Paso to kill Latinos. She’s planning for the worst.

“We think this only happens in shopping centers, in hospitals, in schools but it also happens in your own neighborhood in the backyard of your house,” she says. “We have to (be) at the guard, you never know where it’s going to happen.”

AN IMMIGRANT, MIGRANT-RIGHTS ADVOCATE

Luis Espinoza

Jackson, Mississippi

Most days, he travels to the Greyhound station in Jackson. He waits for people seeking asylum in the U.S. to arrive.

When they step off the bus, strangers in a place where they have nothing and know no one, he’s there. He offers clothes, food, a smile.

He’s lived in America for 28 years. He was born in Ecuador. Two decades ago, he chose to make Mississippi home.

Boxes of donations for individuals under duress after ICE raids in Mississippi fill up much of the waiting room of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA) office in Jackson, Mississippi. Luis Espinoza is a native of Ecuador who emigrated to the United States in 1991 and currently works as an organizer with MIRA.(Photo: Sarah Warnock, Clarion Ledger)

After all these years, Espinoza’s English is fluent but dusted with an accent. After the shooting in El Paso, he thought about the Latino families in his neighborhood.

It’s August, almost time for a new school year.

But how do you feel safe leaving your children at school when you’re afraid to even leave home?

"Parents, even kids, get scared because they don't know how it's going to be when they go back to school," Espinoza says.

Mississippi's Latino immigrants come from different countries, speak different languages and seek residency in the U.S. for different reasons. Some are here to find work — from farmhands to engineers to doctors. Others are students.

Some, like Espinoza, think about life when they first came to America and want to ease the way. He’s an organizer with Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. MIRA for short, which means "look."

Too many people are looking away from what’s happening across the United States, he says. The shooting in El Paso made the nation pay attention to what Latinos have long feared was building since Trump launched his campaign with false stereotypes about Mexicans.

“They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said in June 2015.

It's not just words anymore.

“I think what we need is ask to the authorities, the leaders (to) change what the words they are using,” he says. “Most of the people, they understand you are making just politics, but maybe somebody, somebody who is out of his mind use those words to say, ‘OK, yeah, I’m saving the country. I’m saving my race.' "

Officials linked a hate-filled screed to the 21-year-old white man who drove 10 hours from Dallas to El Paso to kill. In 2,356 words posted to an extremist online message board shortly before the shooting began, the manifesto decried a “Hispanic invasion,” political takeover of Texas and a plan to divide American into territories based on race.

A few days after the shooting, Espinoza went back to the bus station, back to waiting, back to helping strangers who crossed the border for better. He saw something that made him think things might get better for his country.

A group of teenage girls and women stopped by to pass out letters and food. They comforted weary families and learned more about what it means to be an immigrant.

"Not everything is wrong,” he says. “The good people will win in the end.”

Then, a few days later, on the same day that Trump visited El Paso, Espinoza watched as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids detained 680 people. He watched children left behind, no one to pick them up from their first days of school, sobbing for their mothers and fathers.

He joined a rush of Mississippi residents, churches and organizations to help families. He stood next to church leaders weeping aloud.

"This is a horrible situation,” he said.

Espinoza is sitting in MIRA’s office, next to donations for migrant and detained families. A teddy bear with a red ribbon and red heart attached to its hand rests atop a box. He wants people to think.

“Think what you are saying that way crazy people do not use those words to hurt,” he says.

AN IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY, FATHER

Ruben Reyes

Phoenix

He’s finalizing plans to go home for a visit. He wasn’t in El Paso when the shooting happened.

When his phone rang and his father said, “I’m OK,” he wondered what was going on.

That’s when he learned a gunman had gone to the local Walmart — the one at the border, the one his family visits all the time — to kill Mexicans.

His hometown, the place where he was born, where everyone he loves lives, was terrorized. Now he’s trying to figure what it means to be Mexican, Chicano, Latino in America.

“There’s a lot that I think that, personally, I’m trying to digest of the status of the people in my hometown,” he says. “Whether or not we walk around with a target on our back or if El Paso is going to be now the national shooting range for people who have this kind ideology and somehow the gumption to do it.”

He keeps replaying the shooting in his mind. The bloody images come at night, when he wakes up, when he’s working or driving. He thinks of the mindset of the man who killed 22 people.

“I mean that’s scary, that somehow they will import themselves into what I think is one of the safest cities in the country and kill people for the color of their skin,” he says. “It’s absolutely crazy.”

Reyes is used to racism. He grew up with it and has navigated it throughout his adult life. But now the words, the rhetoric, the discrimination is deadly.

“It’s real. It’s violent. And sometimes it ends lives,” he says. “To think of people seeing El Paso as a pot of potential targets for them to go in and have shooting practice takes it to a place I never thought I had to consider."

Since the shooting, he speaks with his Latino family and friends. It doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t an immigrant. It doesn’t matter if you’re Cuban, Guatemalan, Mexican, Puerto Rican. It doesn’t matter, he says, because the differences Latinos see among themselves are invisible to a gunman looking to kill them.

He wants Latinos to think about the divisiveness in their own culture. He laughs at the idea that any brown person would think that white people see any differences when they look at a Latino.

If anything is going to change, he says, Latinos must come together after this shooting, protect each other, push for political and societal change together.

He wants them to think about politics, too. He's an independent, but he's becoming fed up with what he hears from Republicans. Politics are part of his life as an immigration attorney in a country where the border and migrants are in the news every day.

“What people say matters, what the president says matters, how we speak to each other matters, what we exchange on social media matters,” he says. “Places like 8chan, where you have the Daily Stormer or other white nationalist groups who are calling the El Paso shooter a saint. All these things are going to feed into that individual who is waiting for some kind of green light."

When he leaves his home, he thinks about being shot at. He thinks about his children being shot at. And he thinks of how he’d protect them from a gunman. None of that is something he ever considered on a daily basis before.

“The capacity of my fellow Americans to target me or my family or my loved ones simply because I don’t look them, and the ease of which some have proven to be willing to pull a trigger,” he says. “It’s absolutely terrifying."

"I’m a father," he says. "So taking a hit for kids, I’m happy to do that. But the fact that now I’m constantly thinking about it — it’s wearing me down. And I think it’s wearing a lot of people down. Because it’s not … what might happen, it’s what did happen. Two parents died shielding their child from a shooter."

Though he doesn’t want to think of the cultural consequences, people are more afraid to speak their own Spanish language in public, he says.

That pains Reyes because Spanish is the language he spoke with his grandmother, the language in which she told him she loved him.

“Speaking Spanish in public shouldn't be a crime,” he says. “I think that it’s not us who should change. I’m very aware of my history; there are many people of my father’s generation who don’t speak Spanish because … they want you to assimilate. And they’ve lost a part of their culture.”

Reyes says he wishes he didn’t have to face the reality that Americans will do nothing to change gun laws after the shooting in El Paso.

“I think any meaningful legislation will die,” he says. "I’m not sure how much blood it’s going to take to equal the money they’re getting paid to look the other way.”

There’s a question that keeps coming back to him after the shooting: What does it mean to be an American? It’s something he thinks the shooter had his own answer for, and it spurred him to kill.

But Reyes won't let a killer take away his rights.

“Trying to say that I need to become something to become American in my mind invalidates everything that is American.

"I am American by the fact that I am here.

"I was born here, raised here, educated here, I went to the military here, I was willing to die for the people here, I went to school here, I became a lawyer here, I own a business here.

"I am the American dream.”

Standing on a central Phoenix street corner, cicadas screeching, cars passing, he thinks about life after the shooting.

Reyes has decided to use his legal skills to help any undocumented immigrant victims of terror apply for temporary visas so they can get the help they need after the shooting. It’s all he can do, he says, to “help heal my community and provide comfort for those who are suffering.”

He needs to ease his anger. He doesn't know if the fear will ever ease.

A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER, WORKERS-RIGHTS FIGHTER

Rosa Lopez

Passaic County, New Jersey

She travels the back roads and highways of northeastern New Jersey, past the hulking oak and hickory trees, meeting with migrants and workers fighting for their rights. Sometimes for their lives.

She knows what happened in El Paso. It happened at the border, where the U.S. meets Mexico, where her ancestors were born.

Latinos know it could’ve happened in New Jersey.

They know it could've happened in any American state.

“I feel extremely frustrated knowing that these are acts of white supremacy and knowing how vulnerable our communities are,” she says, her eyes hardening as the words spill.

Some days she’s more afraid of nothing changing than she is of bullets.

“I am afraid of people not taking action, that is my biggest fear right now,” she says. “I think this is our crucial moment for our communities to be even more organized.”

She works as an organizer for Make the Road New Jersey. The black-and-white banner for the grassroots organization shows people of all backgrounds on a boat floating over a message: Dignidad. Comunidad. Poder. Dignity. Community. Power.

Portrait of Rosa Lopez, a community organizer for Make the Road New Jersey in Passaic, New Jersey.(Photo: Mitsu Yasukawa/Northjersey.com)

Lopez is defiant.

The country is divided, she says.

It’s time to choose sides before more people die, before more parents are deported, separated from their children, she says.

“Whenever actions like this happen, whenever acts of violence happen, when mass shootings happen it’s usually directed toward minorities, migrants, toward Muslims and people of color, so we have always been subjected to violence," she says.

"I think this is the time for allies and white people to realize that they are playing a role, either by not saying anything or they can also play a role by saying something."

She thinks Latinos with legal authorization to live in the U.S. and those without legal status are coupled now more than ever. They were bound by their roots and now by their blood.

Because a man with a gun wanting to kill brown people doesn't know whether you're a citizen, doesn't care where you're from or what political party you choose.

Lopez blames society, politics, hate, racism and everyone who does nothing. She worries most about a future for children growing up in a country that refuses to learn from its not-so-distant past.

“I think that there is also a failure in the educational system in this country that it clearly is failing to teach real history to students, to kids, to young people about how this country was created and about slavery and about genocide,” she says.

“My message to young children is that you belong here, we all belong here and to have in mind that my parents and your parents came to this country because of the policies this country has created … that has depleted or destroyed ways of living and that has contributed to waves of migration … the best I could say is learn about the real history of this country ... realize that you belong here."

She’d like to believe this is a turning point for Latinos in America.

“I think the current political environment is making us stronger and makes us feel that we can actually fight back,” she says. “I’m still hopeful and I know that our communities are resilient — we have been subjected to extreme violence so, so many times.”

AN ARTIST, SELENA FAN

La Lisa Hernandez

Corpus Christi, Texas

The late Latina music sensation Selena and former President Barack Obama had eaten in this small restaurant.

It has metal napkin holders that look mini toasters, the kind of chairs you see in church halls and a red menu that lists everything from tripas to chicharrones.

In Corpus Christi, Hi-Ho restaurant has a reputation for good Mexican food and people who love their culture and their families. Families sharing meals are watching the woman with long red hair that matches her tinted eyeglasses.

“I’m definitely angry. I’m angry … because this is the manifestation of the hate speech that was unleashed in our political arena and has just been poisoning our community from the top down,” she says.

“It’s given license to people to disregard the humanity of others.”

It’s been building.

“It’s not just Hispanics, it’s people of color in general,” she says.

"I feel like temperatures are just boiling over right now with hate in this country, and folks that say that they don’t see it are being willfully ignorant every day.”

Behind her there’s a little girl and a little boy eating. She waves her hands to punctuate her message and bows her head for a moment.

“Every day, it’s like we’re suffering from exhaustion; it's like a syndrome,” she says.

She’s an artist. She has painted pieces with messages against domestic violence. She grew up in a military family that traveled the world. Now, she sees domestic terrorism against her own Latino community.

She wants people to know what it’s like to wake up and see what politics in America have become.

“New headlines every day making it criminal to be brown in this country," she says.

A COLLEGE STUDENT, DAUGHTER

Angélica Cesar

Tempe, Arizona

She was in Alabama with a group of young Latino people learning about slavery, the Civil Rights Movement and America’s history of racism and discrimination when she heard about the shooting in El Paso.

“My stomach dropped,” she says. “It’s sometimes feels like we haven’t shifted much from what people have been fighting for, for years and years, specifically, with the racial terror and being seen as less human simply because of the color of your skin or because you speak a different language or you have a certain accent”

Cesar was born in California but moved to Mexico City for 10 years before returning to the U.S. She calls her and her family’s story complicated.

She remembers the first time she felt Latinos were treated as less than in America. She was a child with other children in an English Language Learners class.

“I had a German classmate who was treated completely different than I was,” she says. “Her language was celebrated while mine wasn’t, so I’d always felt that difference, I always knew that it was there ... growing up.”

She calls herself a proud Mexican American. So it’s hard, she says, to feel fear about who you are when you love who you are.

“I think the biggest fear is that any of my closest friends or any of my family members or anybody really who’s a part of our community could be targeted for that simple fact of the color of your skin of looking differently, or wearing hoops, maybe, or like displaying your ethnicity or your identity in a certain way that bothers somebody else for no other reason other than it’s different to what they experience.”

The shooting hasn’t just changed how she sees herself, her community, the country she was born in, it’s made her go about her daily life differently.

Angélica Cesar, 22, talks about her perspective after the El Paso shootings. The Arizona State University student was born in the U.S. but comes from a mixed-status family.(Photo: Michael Chow/The Republic)

“It rocked me to my core because I saw that those mini-aggressions and that hate, those passive comments translated into something that actually took 22 people’s lives,” she says. “And that was something that was very, very difficult to deal with and it’s something that has completely shifted the way in which I look at those little comments that are made here and there or those jokes that are made to dehumanize people because they actually have that direct consequences that can sometimes lead to people’s lives being taken.”

She’s studying political science and transborder studies at Arizona State University. Classes are about to start again. She's excited.

But the shooting has made her think about her role.

“As a young Latina, politics … it’s brought about some sense of hopelessness but also given me hope at the same time,” she says.

“Is this ever going to get any better? Is it even worth trying?

"But then you also … know that there are people who are still working who have good hearts and who will continue to do the work until we’re at a place where people can be safe and be at ease with who they are.”

She works for Aliento, an organization that supports young undocumented migrants. The work gives her a chance to be there for others in a way that she felt she needed when she was younger.

Since the shooting, she’s been checking in with the kids, making sure they understand they’re not alone. One girl said she was scared to go shopping for school supplies. Her cousin called her and said she was afraid to go buy new school clothes.

“I think that seeing it displayed in such a violent way puts us at greater risk because it makes us vulnerable and it inspires other hatred to come up and keeps resurfacing specifically with, like, narratives that are sold, what was said in the manifesto, what is sometimes said in the president’s tweets, what is said in speeches over and over again,” she says. “I think that is becoming normalized and it’s making it seem OK to target specific populations or to dehumanize certain groups.”

Having grown up in a family with mixed immigration status, she thought about the shooter’s motives and whom he targeted.

“As we saw, it didn’t really matter if you were a citizen or not when people were getting shot up — those 22 lives that were lost it didn’t come down to status,” she says. “It was primarily that hatred against Latinos, specifically Mexican Americans, and that was very clear in the manifesto written by the shooter.”

She feels a push to do more, she wants that feeling to stick.

“I think since the shooting the main thing that I’ve personally been doing differently is just trying to speak up more and trying to voice my concerns and trying to share my story and trying to share information as much as I can because as heavy as that weight feels, and that stress and that anxiety, it just gets to you and it gets you in your shoulders and in your throat. It also brings about this urgency to communicate,” she says, “and this urgency to get messages out and this urgency to make sure that people are educated, that people are safe and that people feel connected to each other. I think it’s changed me in that way.”

It’s easy to lose yourself in fear, easy to let it control your thoughts and actions. She warns against that way of thinking. She wants people to know they can survive the worst. She has.

“It was my mom and my sister who are undocumented, and I’ve experienced that fear, and I’ve had the worst happen, so my family is no longer with me here in the States, so I’m very familiar experiencing what in that case scenario would be the worst case scenario,” she says. “But still that fear does not define who I am as a person and it does not define how I decide to live my life and the way that I view the world.”

She still can’t stop the tears. Sometimes they make her whole body shake, when she thinks about who and what she’s lost, but she keeps talking. She says she’s strong enough to share her story and use it to help others.

"So when I say as a community we should not operate within that place of fear, it comes from a place of knowing what that fear feels like firsthand, It comes from a place of knowing what it feels like to come home and have your mom not be there to come home and have your aunt tell you your mom’s been detained,” she says.

Soon she’ll leave Arizona for the nation’s capital. She has an internship with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. She wants to visit every monument and talk with every politician who will listen. She’ll call Mexico to tell her mother and her sister all about it.

A VOLUNTEER, WAREHOUSE WORKER

Dano Mendoza

Dover, New Jersey

He’s standing in a grassy park named after President John F. Kennedy, wearing a T-shirt named for the faith-based organization where he volunteers helping immigrants.

He helps Latinos from other countries overcome their fears.

After the shooting, he thought about how much worse it would get for his gente, his people.

“My biggest fears are the actual fear that I can see on my people, the actual fear that I can see in the country,” he says.

Dano Mendoza, 28 of Dover, New Jersey, talks about the fear he and other Latinos feel in the wake of the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.(Photo: Danielle Parhizkaran/NorthJersey.com)

When he’s not working at his warehouse job, he’s teaching migrants their rights, teaching them what to do if police officers or immigration officials show up.

The park is about a block from Dover Town Hall, where Wind of the Spirit organizers have fought for driver’s licenses and city IDs for undocumented immigrants. Latino migrants feel safe in the park. They bring their children here.

He believes Wind of the Spirit's mission isn't just words: “We strive to create an environment free of discrimination. At our core, we are motivated to act by the challenges that immigrants in the United States continue to face.” He wishes he could believe his country is changing for the better.

He doesn’t know if any Latino feels safe anymore. ­­­He sees the American dream slipping away.

“One of the greatest countries in the world is falling backwards in a certain kind of, let’s say — racism, discrimination. We are supposed to be a country, a leader country, we are supposed to lead the world,” he says. “And I’m afraid that we are not doing so, by the mistakes we are committing now as a nation.”

He thinks about what could've stopped the shooting.

‘’I don’t know what will happen next," he says. "What I would like to happen is for everyone to come together as a nation ... everyone to stop hating each other."

AN ARTIST, WITNESS

Guillermo Glenn

El Paso, Texas

He went to pick up a few things at Walmart. The center was busy, as it is most days. Walking down a crowded aisle, he saw something that didn’t make sense.

"I knew there was something really wrong ... but what really confirmed it was I saw a couple of women who were bloody,” he says. “I knew then that there was a shooting."

He threw aside his cart, but he didn’t run.

Guillermo Glenn, one of the eyewitnesses of Walmart shooting, says, the Latino community has dealt with racism for a while, but the shooting and killing were extreme.(Photo: Nick Oza, for USA TODAY)

"I noticed that this middle-aged woman had been shot in the legs and she was sitting right in the aisle,” he says. “She couldn't get up. So me and an elderly lady, we stayed with her, because she was very panicked. She didn't know where her son was. We were trying to calm her down."

There would be many others scrambling to help. He joined shoppers, people, like him, who would later become survivors and witnesses to another mass shooting, this one in his hometown, this one targeting people who look like him.

“I had their blood on my hands, and that was very ... It didn't really hit me as hard as it did later," he says.

He didn’t know then how the shooting would settle inside of him later. He didn't understand, not yet, not fully, how a mass shooting in his border town of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans would hit Latinos across the nation.

Now, he is trying to make sense of how to move forward.

How did this happen? Why did this happen?

“I think we connect it up to a lot of the things that, for instance, (what) President Trump has been saying about immigrants, and we feel very strongly that we're being targeted,” he says.

“That young man from Dallas had an idea about where he was going. He didn't do it by chance."

"He knew there were other white supremacists around El Paso," Glenn says. "We have those people fundraising for the wall and they are armed. We fear that's going to attract other people to come to the border."

Glenn is 78. He’s not afraid to speak the truth. Maybe more truth about what people of color live with would help others stop living in denial.

"In Texas and here in El Paso, there's a strong effort to cover it up if there's any problems of race,” he says. “We can be unified, but we shouldn't cover up the racism that has existed and exists in El Paso."

He grew up at a time when racism was not just overt, it was sanctioned. It was a time when people of color in America couldn’t use the same pools or drinking fountains as white people. When teachers could hit children for speaking Spanish in class. When Jim Crow laws mandating the separation of the races in widespread aspects of public life were systematically instituted across America. When signs posted in Texas restaurants reminded white people of their rights and people of color of their place: "NO DOGS NEGROES MEXICANS."

Glenn remembers growing up in Texas, being taught as a Mexican American that he should root for the Texans who fought and lost the 1835 battle for independence from Mexico. For many Texans, the Battle of the Alamo is remembered as a heroic resistance to oppression. For Glenn, it’s more complicated.

“They taught me, hey, because I grew up in that environment, to fight for the Alamo, without knowing that the Alamo was a battle against slavery,” he says. “Nobody told us that. I was raised to fight for the Alamo ... We had this saying, save your confederate dollars because the South will rise again."

Sitting at a restaurant and cultural center in El Paso, Glenn thinks about how to talk with Latino children about the shooting, about how to ease their fears and teach them better.

"We certainly don't want to promote racism, reverse racism. We don't want to create monsters that somehow are attacking us,” he says. “I think it depends a lot on the age group, but also depends historically on what they read, and what the schools teach.”

He worries that Latino children aren’t being taught to know that they have a history, place and culture in America that dates back to before the United States was formed.

“Last year was the first time that they implemented what was called Mexican American history,” he says. “Here is Texas, they were trying to eliminate Cesar Chavez from the schoolbooks.”

Glenn says he won’t give up on helping migrants in his hometown and country. Even if that makes him more of a target.

"We are not going to stop having open meetings in our community... we have to do our work,” he says. “Because our work is all about injustices and trying to defend a low-income immigrant community... We feel that puts us perhaps in the cross hairs of some of these people."

He thinks about the weapon the man carried to shoot at families in the shopping center.

"We should really think about eliminating those assault weapons,” he says. “I feel that would go a long ways to help. If you can go into a place and kill nine people or 10 people in a few seconds, I don't see how you can justify that."

There’s the saying that people have used since the shooting to describe his community’s resilience. He thinks the rest of his state, maybe the rest of the country, could learn from a city filled with people who have loved ones, jobs, friends and family on both sides of the border.

"Sometimes I don't feel … El Paso is really part of Texas,” he says. “We're such a long ways in a different time zone. El Paso strong I think represents something that perhaps the rest of Texas needs."